Recall

"Maybe a pay-phone in France would still reach you; in the South; in the third or second life. Still then as a teenager, bloodless and senseless, skidding another riven diagram into the dust. Now even staggered into fake quietude I can't believe there is no causeway to the dead. Why should there not be. I know it is just a zip in circumstance. Tending June's snow driven to musk and peachlit common rain."

"I would rather be studding euros into a slot, sighing and missing my tether for living. Grief's seam is ever false to the bereaver, whenever she returns, to the sleeping or to the psychotic. Her things no longer where she left them. And her children's closed forms, like lakes too deep to sound, or too dull. Love for a while was the nearest exit, a problem too wonderful to solve, or bitter to abandon."

Imagined attempts at contact traverse pay-phones in France, southern places, and alternate lives, insisting on a potential causeway to the dead. Memory appears ruptured: teenage images, riven diagrams, and a sense of being bloodless and senseless. Ordinary details—June's snow, euros in a slot, missing tethers—frame yearning in quotidian action. Grief warps presence and possession: belongings are no longer where they were left, and children are rendered closed and unfathomable. Love surfaces as both a tempting exit and an insoluble problem. A final urgency remains to name or close the broken skin of heaven.

Read at The Atlantic